The new marketing playbook: “Marketing Engineers” and agents as the audience

James Cadwallader and his co-founder Dylan Babbs were working six days a week in an office before they had a company, or even an idea. James would drag Dylan into their coworking space on Saturdays, ban laptops, and fill a whiteboard with post-it notes; for a stretch, the leading idea was lithium mining. He calls it hardcore from day minus one. Twenty-one months after launch, Profound is a $1 billion company with more than 700 enterprise customers and over 13% of the Fortune 500 on the platform.

The thesis: marketing is about to change more than it has in the last 25 years. The old internet playbook was built for humans browsing the web. The next one is being built for AI agents interpreting it. When ChatGPT recommends a product, it doesn't just give you a link. It opines, 3,000 characters at a time, and it's a marketer's job to drive what's in those characters. James watched the last platform shift from inside the room, building Kyra and running creative for Nike, Unilever, and Prada while social and TikTok ate the old marketing playbook. Now he's building the infrastructure for this one.

In this conversation, James maps the new marketing operating system. Why you're no longer marketing to John Smith but to John Smith's agent. The "Marketing Engineer", a role Profound coined and Google has already hired for. Why ideas become the bottleneck when content costs nothing to produce. And the culture James calls the best product Profound has built: six days a week in office, and you can still leave at 6pm without anyone batting an eyelid.